Wow. I'm reading this article late, and am sure that no one will ever see my response, but I find this way too amusing not to make note of for the record. The article author writes, quote:
[snip] The crux of Martin's message today is that the revolution CASE began that allowed computers to partly program themselves-- rather than depend entirely upon slow, expensive, error-prone humans-- will accelerate logarithmically in the near future.
Martin is nobody's fool. [snip]
...except maybe a mathematician's. It's been a while since I had the section on algorithmic complexity in my college programming classes, but isn't logarithmic growth the kind that goes something like this?
[snip overelaborate ascii sketch of a logarithmic curve, omitted because/.'s lameness filter thought that all the 's were just junk characters. they weren't dammit! well. if you don't know what a logarithmic curve looks like, try here:
If that's right, and I think that it is, then he's talking about diminishing returns, in which we get less progress in the future, rather than more. Linear growth would give constant improvement, exponentional would be, well, exponential. Logarithmic growth would, and please correct me if I'm wrong, give effectively diminished growth over time. Right?
Martin may or may not be some sort of great thinker, but the author of this article seems to be a colossal idiot, getting important details wrong, leaving out failed predictions (of which I'm sure Martin has had many in the past, and there seem to be some clear stinkers in this writeup as well), and ridiculously assuming that his business credentials ("oooh, he was a travelling IBM salesman"...big deal) somehow make him some sort of Cassandra. They do not. These credentials say nothing about Martin's ability to predict the future, but they do indicate that this author is a gullible fool.
I was going to make some snide remark along the lines of "the best book for someone wanting to learn Java would be a Python manual!", but this is a pretty slow thread so constructive criticism would probably be more welcome. Oh well.:)
I really liked the previous editions of O'Reilly's Java in a Nutshell and Java Examples in a Nutshell. My job doesn't involve Java (thank the gods!:), so I haven't had much use for them, but still they sit on my bookshelf, and my co-workers that do program in Java have either borrowed both of them repeatedly or have copies of their own. (The same author, David Flanagan, is also the author of a couple of O'Reilly's JavaScript books, but that's not what you're looking for here.)
(Ok sorry I can't resist -- my favorite lame Java bashing line: "Java has all the graceful simplicity of a systems language like C with the incredible performance of a scripting language like Python. That is to say, it's ugly as hell & slow as shit." Personally, I say if you're better off going with ugly but fast, like C, or pretty but slow, like Python. Java is the worst of all worlds, remarkable mainly for the dexterity with which Sun's marketing department has shoved this terrible language down our collective throats.)
But, like I say, I'm trying to be constructive here:). Less sarcastically, the Nutshell books are great, both as a learning tool and as a refernce later, after you're comfortable with the language. The same applies with other books in the series too.
It occurs to me that banner ads on a search engine are probably doomed to failure anyway: if a visitor comes in specifically looking for topic $foo, they're not gonna care about advertisement $bar. People using the web have notoriously short attention spans -- or I do, anyway:). Most of the time, they aren't likely to allow themselves to be distracted by an ad (or the link beyond it) unless it happens to be *really* close to what they're looking for in the first place. And even then, if I'm searching for e.g. "mistadobalina" and I happen to be shown an ad for Del Tha Funkee Homosapien's home page, I'm going to be skeptical about clicking on it out of fear that that site just wants me to buy something, even if that would otherwise be the exact site I'm looking for.
The book & movie were written simultaneous, as a collaborative effort. Both Kubrick & Clarke deserve equal credit. It is perfectly legitimate to attribute many of the elements in 2001 to Kubrick, when considering that a lot of the same themes showed up through all of his movies, and not just becase Clarke put them in this one.
All I'm getting is a 404 error. Did they pull the page down? Lynx tells me that:
Lynx 2.8.3rel.1 (23 Apr 2000)
File that you are currently viewing
Linkname: 404 File Not Found - HEAD
URL: http://research.microsoft.com/msripv6/fnord.htm
Charset: iso-8859-1 (assumed)
Owner(s): None
size: 9 lines
mode: normal
You aren't reviewing the game, your reviewing the bad status of the game. You didn't get it to work, so its a bad game?
Err, yeah, exactly. Kinda like going to a movie & the projectionist is trying to make sense of this big box full of film snippets, because the studio couldn't be bothered to edit it all together. If it ain't done yet, then it doesn't deserve a good review.
Software producers get off way too easily here, and should be held accountable for products shipped before they're ready for use. I'll make an exception for free software (which is never really done yet), but if you want to bundle it up & make money off it, then you have to be able to stand behind what you've done. Or half-done, in cases such as this one.
On the contrary, it sounded to me like a perfect review. Like Michael said, if you want to find a review that talks about how great the game was, such writeups are easy to find. (Kind of like Slashdot book reviews: it's easy to find someone who will give a couple pages fellatiatory nonsense if that's what you really want.) But it you want something a bit more critical / analytical, that's rarer & much more valuable. The usual games publications can't afford to give a negative review, lest they want to piss off their suppliers & advertisers. Slashdot, in this context, has room to be more honest, and that's what you saw here.
So this company released a half-assed product. The Slashdot staff was apparently unable to even get the product running, and yet you want details about how it ran? It sounds to me like it didn't run at all, and I'm glad they said so. That's *very* helpful.
As another respondent suggested, I'd love to see a version of Consumer Reports for software. Too much half-assed (&/or bloated) garbage gets released to the public (like, oh, any version of Office from the last five years), and things like UCITA make it difficult or impossible to find this out for ourselves until our money is spent and our computers are corrupted.
I'm not a fan of computer games, but I liked Myst & Riven, and was thinking about getting a copy of Myst III. That's not gonna happen now, because of this very helpful review. You didn't like it, you wanted something more like fellatio, fine. Michael told you where you can find it. Myself, I was very glad to read this review. It was helpful to me.
Whoa, that's a lot of disc space. I could probably cram it on there, but the laptop came with a pretty small hard drive, as compared to the rest of the hardware, which was (at the time - last year) fairly powerful for the most part -- 128mb ram, 733mhz cpu, etc.. The video stuff is also weaker -- 8mb ram, and probably not 3D (though the display settings don't seem to say either way) (which probably answers the question implicitly...).
Sounds like I'd pretty much have to overhaul the system. I'd be willing to upgrade the ram, but aside from that, forget it. Oh well. Thanks for the information. (Oh, and I think the closest Fry's is about 3000 miles from here, unless they've set up shop on theEast Coast & I didn't hear about it...:)
Several years ago, I played & enjoyed Dune II. Last year I got (& misplaced) a copy of Dune II, and that seemed fun too. (For a five dollar game, I was pleased...). It was only much later did I ever hear of C&C, and though I can see that Dune is a pretty blatant ripoff, I just don't care.
I liked Dune better than C&C for the same reason that I liked X-Wing & Tie Fighter better than other piloting games: it was fun & it reminded me of a movie and I could get into the characters without having to wade through someone else's hokey back story. (Rather, it was a hokey back story that I was already familiar with:). Someone asked why games companies bother making product like this instead of flagships like C&C, well, I'm yer answer -- some people could give a rat's ass about their flagships.:)
So. Does anyone know [a] how much this one's gonna cost, and [b] what specs it requires? I can throw it on my NT laptop from work, but I'm not about to "upgrade" to 2k or ME just for a video game. If it was fairly cheap & would work on a PIII/128mb ram/NT4sp6 computer (which dual boots into BeOS, not that I expect that to be useful...), I might consider it. Just curious -- their web site doesn't say a damn thing about the requirements or cost and I don't really feel like looking around for a copy at the malls if it's not gonna work anyway...
That's not what it says
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There is a story over at the CBC about wanting to solve the worlds long term energy problems with ICE
Yeah, well that's the headline, but if you read more than the first paragraph you realize that that's not at all what they're saying. They're trying to get at methane (natural gas) that happens to be locked in ice, but that (duh!) isn't itelf ice.
It may be methane in a frozen state, but that is hardly the conventional meaning of the term "ice". This is a bit like saying $oil_company is trying to meet energy needs with dirt, because they're digging an oil rig that happenes to bore though dirt.
The fact is, these methane deposits seems to exist along a lot of the world's continental shelves, but we haven't yet found a way to bring them to the surface. So these people happen to be going after one of these deposits that happens to be sitting in some arctic ice. Nifty, but not news, and certainly not news in the way this was written up.
Nothin' says editorial integrity like a Slashdot writeup....
A few weeks ago, NPR had an show on the sad state of the space program. Among the speakers was very cool astronaut Story Musgrave, who pointed out that the shuttle, even though it has flaws, went from design to deployment faster & more cheaply than anything NASA is doing today. In the time the recently axed successor to the shuttle was in devlopment, it cost far more & achieved far less than the shuttle developers had done in the 70s. And the shuttle itself is no pinnacle of success either -- apparently the entire Apollo program was cheaper (not to mention far more ambitious) than a few shuttle launches.
NASA is in a sorry state right now. The space station is a lousy way to get out of the stagnation that we've been locked in ever since the shuttle program got underway. More competition from a Russian/Australian alliance (as well as from China et al) could be a very good thing, both for NASA and for global space exploration in general.
I'm for anything that would get us off our asses and have us out doing something interesting, like exploring Mars, rather than putting Yet Another Damn Tin-can in orbit. Someone at NASA has a huge David Bowie fixation, methinks....
This page contains a collection of corporate email disclaimers, preserved intact for future generations, as of 19/04/01. All contents (sic). Lest we forget.
Among other things, this page has an earlier and much shorter version of the UBS warburg disclaimer. Apparently it has been growing -- run away! run away!
Ahh, if only it were that easy to make Flash go away. Sadly, the software is out in the wild, and even if we cut off the source, we'll still be seeing stupid Flash intro pages for years to come. Killing off Flash is indeed an admirable goal, but I'm afraid this isn't the most effective way to do it.
My bike, with my fat butt on it, has been radared at 215.
"And my penis, which I am very self-conscious about, has been measured at 2.15 inches."
Sorry, I know this is flamebait, but damn I can't help but think there's a very large grain of truth behind the idea that a man's penis size is inversely proportional to the horsepower-to-mass ratio (or just raw horsepower, depending on the version of the formula you find funniest) of the vehicle he drives.
In a blatant attempt to violate this law, my dream car is an Austin (or Morris, et al -- whatever) MINI. These are the coolest cars in the world. Someday I will have one. Oh yes. Someday...:)
<sarcasm> Right. If it's not a 100% solution, it's not a solution at all, is it? Better to do nothing than to do too little. Republican logic is so much more creative than regular human logic... </sarcasm>
Seriously, if you have a population of $num people, and each person is consuming $quan amount of energy, then the total consumption is of course going to be $num * $quan. If each individual can reduce their consumption, even marginally, then the net result -- $num * ($quan - $conserv) -- can be pretty significant on the aggregate. Certainly cheaper than producing lots more power plants.
I'm willing to accept that we may need more plants, but it would be a lot less expensive for everybosdy if, say, everyone stopped driving those stupid Suburban Ussault Vehicles. The reality is that any solution is going to be a big, expensive project for the country to undertake, and anything that helps control the size & burden of that project would be much welcomed.
Re:In accordance with prophesy
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Shared Source?
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As another poster provided, the URL changed (& I didn't know the new name). The.sig has been corrected (yay!).
Just propagatin' the memes. Flamebait? That's hardly fair, but oh well.:)
In accordance with prophesy
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Shared Source?
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I'm so sick to death of seeing big, boring, bloated Powerpoint slideshows that are, aside from being generally completely devoid of content, also a terrible waste of resources.
A Flash movie with the same content can be much more dynamic, much smaller, and will work on damn near any platform without modification -- most everyone with a web browser seems to have the plugin for it by now. I'm not a fan of Flash by any means, but for this sort of task, I can't imagine why anyone would use Powerpoint instead.
Powerpoint is, quite simply, pointless software.
As for the dual headed thing, other posters have addressed this. It's pretty easy with most modern hardware...
A footnote from Mr Wheat's email, which didn't fit in the other reply:
End of official "Reply." Now, here are some Kubrick word-play names to add to your list:
Heywood R. Floyd:
HE comes from HElen--Helen of Troy
Y is Spanish for "and"
WOOD comes from "WOODen horse"--the Trojan Horse
RFL is from "reflect"
OY comes from "trOY."
D stands for downfall.
Put them all together and you get "Helen and Wooden Horse Reflect Troy's Downfall."
Dave Bowman:
Dave is short for David, who slew the giant Goliath by planting a rock in his forehead. Dave Bowman slays a giant (Hal-Discovery) by attacking the brain inside Discovery's forehead.
Bowman literally means bowman and refers to Odysseus, who was a renowned bowman.
Frank Poole: [F]rank Poole is a "90 percent anagram" in which the last nine letters can be rearranged to form the phrase "[W]alk on rope." This phrase alludes to Frank's role as the symbol for Nietzsche's rope dancer, or tightrope walker.
HAL 9000:
HAL is the letters IBM retreated one notch back down the alphabet. On the man-machine symbiosis allegory the HAL-IBM connection symbolizes the synthesis of man (Hal, a man's name) and machine (IBM, a machine's name). In the Zarathustra allegory, HAL-IBM refers to Nietzsche's idea that man created God in his own image. IBM symbolizes the idea that Hal-Discovery (God) was created by man, as all machines are, and HAL (a man's name) symbolizes the idea that God is the image of man. Arthur Clarke denies that the name Hal involves symbolism, but on pages 72-75 of my book I give six reasons for believing Clarke is wrong.
9000 refers to the first 9000 years of history in the mythological history of the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism--the 9000 years that precede the arrival of Zarathustra, who arrives in 9001, the first year of the tenth millennium. Hal and Dave Bowman arrive at the same time, so the "9000" in Hal's name describe's Dave's (Zarathustra's) arrival time too. In the film's title, 2001 symbolizes 9001: the first year of one millennium symbolizes the first year of another.
Elena: Elena, the name of the female Russian scientist Heywood Floyd meets on the space station, is Russian for Helen. Elena symbolizes Helen--Helen of Troy. Her presence inside the slotted female space station identifies
her with the female partner in the copulation between the phallic earth shuttle (male) and the space station. Floyd, who symbolizes Paris (Helen's seducer) at this point, was inside the shuttle, identifying it with Paris.
TMA-1 = TMA-ONE: This name is an anagram whose letters can be rearranged to form "No Meat." TMA-1 is the name of the moon monolith, which symbolizes the meatless (wooden) Trojan Horse.
AE-35: I didn't include this one in the book, because I wasn't certain enough of my interpretation. But AE seems to stand for AEolus,
king of the winds, whose winds cause trouble for Odysseus. And the 35? A hurricane is the epitome of wind. And the Hawker Hurricane, the famous British fighter plane from World War II, is associated with the number 35 in three ways: (1) The plane was first test flown in '35 (1935). (2) The original plane had a ceiling of 35,000 feet, although later models got up to 36,000. (3) The prototype Hurrican was labeled F.36/34, the two numbers of which average out to 35. Meanwhile, the AE-35 unit causes trouble for Bowman (it leads indirectly to Poole's death),
just as Aeolus's winds causes trouble for Odysseus.
I hope you find this information useful, or at least interesting.
I was emailed the following letter from Leonard Wheat last night. I have never met the man before; he was simply replying to my comment -- which is apparently the only one here that gave him, and Kubrick, a fair treatment. I thought anyone still reading this discussion would find it interesting:
Author's Reply to Reviewer:
This is Len Wheat, author of Kubrick's 2001: A Triple Allegory, speaking. I'm here to point out some errors, misrepresentations, out-of-context quotations, and other problems with Cliff Lampe's review. I do appreciate
Cliff's saying that, although "this book goes too far at times," it "is worth reading." Still, the general tone
of the review-the basic notion that my analysis is "pretty topsy-turvy" and "loony"-is negative. The negativism
rests on dubious ideas.
Let's begin with Cliff's statement that "[Wheat] uses scripts, director's notes, and some interviews to provide
evidence for some of his claims." The source of this "information" is Cliff's imagination. I saw no scripts, read
no director's notes, and interviewed nobody. Nowhere in the book is there any such "evidence," except that I do
refer at two points to script evidence seen by other writers (Walker and Bizony). These facts tell you something
about the level of accuracy to expect in the rest of the review.
That said, let's examine (1) Cliff's misguided quest for literalism in symbols, (2) his failure to grasp the
subtle nature of most symbolism, (3) his misrepresentation of the TMA-1 anagram was being the basis for my saying
the moon monolith symbolizes the wooden Trojan Horse, and (4) his out-of-context presentation of my assertion that
the three hexagons surrounding Discovery's three pairs of rear-end excretory orifices represent bathroom tiles.
CLIFF'S IMPLICIT DEMAND FOR LITERALISM IN SYMBOLS: A basic problem with the review is that Cliff
refuses to recognize as genuine any symbols that don't come pretty close to being literal-symbols that don't reach
out and slap you in the face. He doesn't seem to realize that many symbols, Kubrick's especially, are subtle.
Recognizing them requires seeing analogies and paying attention to narrative and physical contexts. Cliff accepts
Bowman's name as symbolizing Odysseus, because Odysseus was literally a bowman (user of the Great Bow). And he
accepts the well established idea that Bowman's space voyage symbolizes Odysseus's sea odyssey, because (a) the
movie's subtitle literally says "Space Odyssey," (b) Bowman literally "goes on a long voyage," and (c) Bowman,
like Odysseus, literally "loses all his crew."
But Cliff can't point to any other Kubrick symbols-nonliteral symbols-identified by me that he will accept.
Indeed, Cliff can't bring himself to recognize even some fairly literal symbols, including the ones representing
hexagonal bothroom tiles. I'll give four examples of fairly literal symbols that Cliff implicitly rejects when
he calls my interpretations "loony."
First, the Laestrygonian rock attack. Odysseus goes to the land of the Laestrygonians. All the ships in his
fleet except his own anchor in a harbor. The harbor is ringed by cliffs (no pun intended). The Laestrygonians
are nasty-and strong. They stand on the cliffs and throw down huge rocks, splintering the ships in the harbor and
killing the crews. Odysseus's ship, outside the harbor, barely escapes under a hail of rocks. Cut to the movie.
Just before Bowman goes out on his first space walk, we see an exterior shot of Discovery. Two huge meteroids
come hurtling past. Kubrick is symbolizing Odysseus's escape from the Laestrygonian rock attack. But Cliff doesn't
believe it. Not literal enough. Sure, the rock symbols are literally rocks, and they literally come close to hitting
the ship; but the space rocks are not literally thrown, so I guess the overall symbolism is not literal enough for
Cliff to accept. The idea that the meteoriods could be symbolic is, to him, just another "loony" interpretation.
Second, the three disabled survey crewman. Odysseus visits the land of the Lotus-eaters. He sends three crewman
inland to survey the territory, so to speak. The three eat lotus, lose the desire to return, and have to be dragged
back to the ship and put in irons, unable to perform their duties. Cut to the movie. During the BBC interview
near the beginning of the space odyssey, Bowman says (a) his three hibernating crewman are (b) "the survey team."
And the three are, for the time being, (c) disabled-unable to perform duties. Isn't that literal enough?
Third, the Movie's Title. Cliff focuses on the Odysseus allegory, giving short-shrift to the main allegory,
which depicts Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra (TSZ). This misdirected emphasis is strange, because (a)
the Zarathustra allegory has at least 160 symbols, compared to 55 for the Odysseus allegory, (b) I devote two
chapters to the Zarathustra allegory but only one to the Odysseus allegory, and (c) the Zarathustra allegory
is alluded to in the movie's title, whereas Odysseus's odyssey is mentioned in the secondary spot-the subtitle.
Where does the title allude to TSZ? Nietzsche bases TSZ's title character, Zarathustra, on the Persian prophet
Zarathustra (a.k.a. Zoroaster), founder of the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism. In Zoroastrian mythology,
Zarathustra arrives after 9,000 years of history, at the beginning of the tenth millennium. The year is 9001.
In the Zarathustra allegory, Bowman symbolizes Zarathustra. So he must arrive at the beginning of a new millennium.
The movie's title year, 2001, symbolizes 9001, the year Zarathustra arrives. One millennial year symbolizes another.
But Cliff, I gather, thinks my interpretation is "loony," because "2001" isn't literal enough: Kubrick seemingly
(to Cliff) would have named his film 9001 if he wanted to symbolize Zarathustra's millennium. Well, Cliff, if you
look hard enough you can find the 9000 years that expire before Zarathustra arrives. Hal, who arrives at the same
time as Bowman, has as his full name HAL-9000: he is arriving after 9000 years.
Fourth, God's Sticking Out His Tongue and Blowing a Bubble. TSZ tells the story of man's evolution from (1)
ape to (2) lower man, the believer, who creates God, to (3) higher man, the nonbeliever, who figuratively kills
God by ceasing to believe, to (4) overman, a mentally and morally superior being. Young Zarathustra, representing
lower man, creates God ("I created him"), and the God he creates is the image of man ("A man he was"): Nietzsche
is turning the Bible upside down by saying that man created God in is own image. Later, the mature prophet (now
a higher man) kills God, declaring "God is dead!"
In the Zarathustra allegory, Dave Bowman is the mature Zarathustra. The image-of-man God he kills is symbolized by
Hal-Discovery-the spaceship and its computer brain. To be a good symbol, Hal-Discovery must have some image-of-man
attributes. I'll describe these characteristics in some detail when I get to the hexagons. But for now, just
recognize that Hal-Discovery has a head (with a brain inside) and three mouths, arranged in a row resemble a human
mouth. In one scene Discovery opens his mouth (pod bay door), sticks out his tongue (pod launching ramp), blows
a spherical bubble (space pod), and watches it rise over his head. Alas, the "tongue" isn't literally a tongue,
just a pod launching ramp; and the "bubble" isn't literally a bubble, just a metal sphere. Besides, Kubrick would
never resort to humor, subtle humor at that. (The pun in the name Bat Guano, from Dr. Strangelove, must have been
unintentional.) So Cliff rejects my tongue-and-bubble interpretation. Indeed, he seems to reject the whole idea
that Hal-Discovery, created by man and then killed by man during man's ascent from ape to overman (the star-child),
could symbolize God. I wonder who, or what, he thinks the real God symbol is, or if he even thinks there is one.
(He seems to acknowledge that there is a Zarathustra allegory.)
THE SUBTLE NATURE OF MOST SYMBOLISM: Most allegorical symbolism and other literary and film symbolism is
not as literal as the symbolism described above. It is subtle, resting on analogy, word play, and other hidden-or
at least hard to see-characteristics. Let's examine two closely related examples: (1) Nietzsche's rope dancer
parable and (2) Frank Poole's anagrammatic name.
Nietzsche's Rope Dancer Parable. Early in TSZ, Nietzsche presents his parable of the rope dancer. "Rope dancer" is
an archaic name for a tightrope walker. The rope dancer symbolizes mankind. He is walking on a rope stretched between
two towers. The tower he comes out of symbolizes the ape (the first stage in ape-lower man-higher man-overman),
and the tower he is trying to reach symbolizes overman (the last stage). When the rope dancer is part way across,
a buffoon-a symbol for God-steps onto the rope from the first tower, comes up behind the rope dancer, leaps over
him, and proceeds in triumph to the far tower, thereby achieving supremacy. Frightened, the rope dancer falls to
his death. Zarathustra, standing below, picks up the rope dancer's body and later disposes of it.
In this parable, almost all of the symbolism is subtle, not literal. The only thing approaching literalism is
Nietzsche's use of a man, the rope dancer, to symbolize mankind. But how can a tower symbolize either the ape
or overman, let alone both? A tower isn't even alive. Well, the first tower is where man's journey from ape to
overman begins (at ape), and the second tower is where the journey ends (at overman). Beginning and end are the
first two subtleties-analogical relationships-you must grasp. But how can the buffoon symbolize God? Nietzsche
says man creates God: man, not God, is the creator. So God comes after man, just as the buffoon comes after the
rope dancer (both temporally and spatially)-another analogy. And God, to Nietzsche, is an idiotic concept, hence
"buffoon." Also, the God man creates is himself a man ("A man he was"), so a man-the buffoon-is a good symbol for God.
Fear causes the rope dancer to fall: man's fear of God dooms man's chances of becoming the supreme being, overman.
Only one being can be supreme. When man makes God the Supreme Being, man dooms his own chances of evolving into
a supreme being (overman). That is the parable's symbolic message.
Frank Poole's Anagrammatic Name. In 2001, Frank Poole is the character who symbolizes the rope dancer. How can
this be, given that he does not literally walk on a rope? The answer is easy to deduce. Hal-Discovery, we have
already seen, symbolizes God, and Frank's space pod is a detachable part of God's body-God's shoulders, arms, and
hands. Now observe six subtle clues. (1) The pod-view it either as a part of Hal-Discovery or a weapon used by
Hal-Discovery-comes up behind Frank, just as the buffoon came up behind the rope dancer. (2) The pod kills Frank,
just as the buffoon killed the rope dancer. (3) Frank is taking a spacewalk-a figurative walk-when he is killed.
(4) Dave Bowman, symbolizing Zarathustra, picks up Franks body, just as Zarathustra picked up the rope dancer's body.
(5) Bowman later releases Frank's body, figuratively disposing of it, just as Zarathustra disposed of the rope
dancer's body. (6) Bowman, verifying that he really does symbolize Zarathustra, later kills Hal, just as Zarathustra
"kills" God by ceasing to believe and declaring, "God is dead!" Cliff considers interpretations like this "loony."
But that is because he fails to recognize that most symbolism involves subtlety, and he finds subtlety hard to
grasp.
Now we come to Frank's name. Cliff quotes me out of context when he quotes me as writing, "These letters
[TMA-ONE], like the last nine in Frank Poole, can be rearranged to form an anagram." Cliff doesn't even bother
to say what the anagram is. Naturally, many Slashdot readers have taken Cliff's word for it-"loony"-and have
ridiculed the idea that Frank Poole is an anagram. But we know Kubrick uses anagrams. A Slashdot commentator
named Babbage, in comments #224 and #225-points out that, "in Kubrick's version of 'Lolita,' he has a character
named Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov-the author that wrote the original book." (Babbage also
gives five other examples of Kubrick's "anagrams, puns, and general word play." His comments-the most intelligent
I have read in this Kubrick's 2001 forum-deserve your consideration. What they don't deserve is the score of only
2 given them by Slashdot's Comment Rating Bureau.) Also, I have already mentioned the punnish name Bat Guano-another
type of word play-from Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. (If you don't know what guano is, use your dictionary.)
Frank Poole is what I call a 90 percent anagram. The last 9 of the 10 letters of "[F]rank Poole" can be rearranged
to form "[W]alk on Rope." I figured that one out by starting out with the knowledge that Frank Poole symbolized
the rope dancer. Then I looked for phrases like "Rope Dancer," "Rope Walker," "Dance on Rope," and "Walk on Rope."
I didn't have to look far. Cliff seems to consider the whole idea that Kubrick uses anagrams-Frank Poole, TMA-ONE,
Vivian Darkbloom-"just a skoach over the top." But I consider Cliff's refusal to judge these anagrams in context
as something akin to burying one's head in the sand. In the case of "Frank Poole," the context is the six points
of evidence showing that Frank Poole symbolizes the rope dancer.
THE TMA-1 ANAGRAM: I wrote that, when you spell out the figure 1, TMA-1 becomes TMA-ONE. These letters
can be rearranged to form the anagram "No Meat." The phrase humorously alludes to the Trojan Horse's being made
of wood rather than flesh and blood. Cliff presents the TMA-1 anagram in an out-of-context way that invites
challenges to the anagram's validity. The moon monoliths name, TMA-1, comes before the monolith itself in 2001,
so I discuss the name first. But in doing so I write, "In the next scene, . . . it becomes evident that TMA-1
[the monolith] symbolizes the wooden Trojan Horse." In other words, the evidence of the monolith's identity is in
my discussion of the next scene, where the astronauts examine the monolith. In this discussion I present evidence
(1) from the scene itself and (2) from surrounding scenes that establish the sequential context of the symbolism.
Evidence from the Monolith Scene. In Homer's The Odyssey, Troy falls to the Greeks immediately before Odysseus
begins his odyssey, his homeward voyage back from Troy. The Greeks build a huge, hollow wooden horse, the Trojan
Horse. Greek warriors hide inside. A clever ruse tricks the Trojans (residents of Troy) into bringing the Trojan
Horse (1) inside the walls of Troy. After dark, (2) something-a bunch of Greek warriors-comes out of the horse.
The warriors open the city gates, allowing the Greek army to enter and (3) inflict pain-actually death-on the
people of Troy. Thus does Troy fall.
Observe the 1-2-3 parallelism in 2001's moon monolith scene. (1) The monolith is inside the walls of a
pit, walls that symbolize the walls of Troy. (2) Something-a loud signal-comes out of the monolith. (3) The
astronauts, symbolizing the Trojans, fall back in pain. A fourth symbolic element, word play again, is also
present. Kubrick-or more likely Clarke-scoured the list of the hundreds of named craters on the moon and put the
monolith in the crater whose name most nearly resembles the name Troy. (4) The chosen crater was one named Tycho.
It has the same initial letter as Troy, T, and it also has two of Troy's other three letters-o and y. Given the
knowledge that The Odyssey is being allegorized, we find in these four pieces of evidence ample reason to infer
that the monolith symbolizes the Trojan Horse.
Evidence from the Story's Sequential Context. But the above evidence is just the beginning. More evidence of
the monolith's symbolic identity comes from the sequence of events. Troy's fall and the events immediately preceding
and following it display this sequence: (1) Menelaus, a Greek king, returns from a trip and is briefed on something
that has happened: his wife, Helen (now known as Helen of Troy), has been seduced by Paris and taken to Troy. (2)
Menelaus embarks for Troy with an army on 1,000 ships (whence Helen's moniker, "the face that launched a thousand
ships"). (3) Using the Trojan Horse, the Greeks conquer Troy. (4) Odysseus, in the first episode on his odyssey,
attacks the city of Ismarus. This episode has four features: (a) crewmen running through the streets of Ismarus
and (b) fighting the inhabitants, after which Odysseus (c) loots the city and then (d) gets figuratively burned
in a counterattack that kills 72 of his men. (5) Odysseus goes to the land of the Lotus eaters and winds up with
three disabled crewmen, shackled and unable to perform their duties.
The relevant events of 2001's surface story follow the same sequence. (1) Heywood R. Floyd, symbolizing Menelaus,
is briefed on something. (2) A long, many-footed (two rows of landing feet), bug-eyed (front windows) moon bus
travels to the crater Tycho-Troy. The bus symbolizes a millipede (mil = 1,000; ped = foot), whose figurative
1,000 feet symbolize the thousand ships sailing for Troy. (3) The moon monolith performs in its walled enclosure.
(4) The space odyssey begins. Its first four events are (a) Frank Poole's-Bowman's only active crewman's-jogging,
which symbolizes Odysseus's crewmen running through the streets of Ismarus, (b) Poole's shadowboxing, symbolizing
the fighting, (c) Bowman's "looting" the food dispensing machine, and (d) Bowman's burning his fingers on the food,
symbolizing Odysseus' getting burned in the counterattack. (5) The BBC interview comes up on the TV, and we hear
Bowman say that his three-man "survey team" is in hibernation-disabled, just like the men on Odysseus' three-man
survey team.
Back to the Anagram. It is in this double context-the context of the moon monolith scene and the sequential
context of before-and-after events-that the anagram (TMA-1 = TMA-ONE = NO MEAT) must be interpreted. Once you deduce
by other means that the monolith symbolizes the meatless (wooden) Trojan Horse, the anagram's validity is obvious.
Sure, somebody said that two other anagrams-NO TEAM and NO MATE-could be formed from the six letters, but they
don't fit the context. Only NO MEAT describes the Trojan Horse. Note, by the way, how subtle Kubrick can get.
In the other anagram he omitted the first letter of both [F]rank Poole and "[W]alk on rope." In the TMA-1 anagram
he makes you discover that "1" must be spelled out before the anagram can be found.
THE HEXAGON SYMBOLISM: Cliff also rejects my claim that the three hexagons at Discovery's rear end-we
all have rear ends, don't we?-symbolize bathroom tiles and are part of a scatological joke about God's going to
the bathroom. Earlier in this reply I noted that Hal-Discovery symbolizes Nietzsche's version of God, the God
created by man in his (man's) own image. As part of Kubrick's God symbol, Discovery must be the image of man.
So Kubrick gives him a huge bulbous head, wide-band mod sunglasses (the high-on-the-head windows), three mouths
(pod bay doors) arranged in a horizontal row to resemble a single mouth, a tongue (pod launching ramp) for each
mouth, a tapered neck behind the head, a segmented spine, a sacrum (tailbone) at the base of the spine, three
pairs of excretory orifices (rocket nozzles)-one pair for each mouth-below the sacrum (same place as in humans),
and a bathroom (hexagonal bathroom tile) for each pair of excretory orifices. Hal-Discovery, again like humans,
can see, hear, and talk; he has human emotions, such as enthusiasm and fear; he is mortal; and he becomes senile
before dying ("Daisy, Daisy").
Note that part of this physical-mental context is the three pairs of excretory orifices. If that's too
scatological for you to accept, you probably don't think the Dr. Strangelove puns in Colonel Bat Guano's name
are anything but accidental. But if you recognize Kubrick's penchant for humor, including scatological humor, it
should not surprise you that the rocket nozzles symbolize the orifices God uses to excrete his waste. And if you
are familiar with the small hexagonal white bathroom floor tiles that were commonplace in the 1930s, it again should
not surprise you that Kubrick has God doing his excreting where it should be done-in the bathroom. Bury your head in
the sand if you must, Cliff, but those three hexagons do symbolize bathroom tiles. There are jokes in this movie.
If you're still unconvinced that the hexagons are part of a Kubrick joke, consider a related joke. The Bible
says woman was made from a bone, Adam's rib. Kubrick, who turns the Bible upside down in several places, makes a
counterclaim: God, a man, was made from a bone. Begin by noting that Kubrick's God is a bony God, essentially an
abstracted skull and spine. Now ask: how did we get to this bony God? We got there in an eight-stage, 41-minute
evolutionary process, to wit: (1) A prehuman ape picks up animal bone-we start with a bone-and converts it into
a primitive weapon, a club. (2) The primitive weapon, tossed into the air, morphs into a space-age weapon, an
orbiting nuclear bomb. (3) The orbiting bomb evolves into an elongated, self-propelled, phallic space shuttle.
(4) In sexual symbolism that Roger Ebert was the first to point out-I wasn't the first to recognize this-the phallus
penetrates the slot in the rotating female space station: coitus. (5) A spherical moon lander symbolizing a sperm
cell-Ebert missed this part-travels to the moon, a larger sphere that symbolizes the ovum, which is larger than the
sperm. (6) Hangar doors on the moon open up, allowing the lander-sperm to enter and fertilize the moon: conception.
(7) The fetus gestates: Part 2's subtitle, "18 Months Later," informs us that God, who is twice as smart as humans,
has a gestation period twice as long as that of humans. (8) The bony male God is born slowly, horizontally from
offscreen into the starry universe.
I hate to say this, Cliff, but those long hours you're putting in on your dissertation have dulled your senses.
You no longer catch onto subtle jokes when you hear them.
Slashdot Mirror
...except maybe a mathematician's. It's been a while since I had the section on algorithmic complexity in my college programming classes, but isn't logarithmic growth the kind that goes something like this?
If that's right, and I think that it is, then he's talking about diminishing returns, in which we get less progress in the future, rather than more. Linear growth would give constant improvement, exponentional would be, well, exponential. Logarithmic growth would, and please correct me if I'm wrong, give effectively diminished growth over time. Right?
Martin may or may not be some sort of great thinker, but the author of this article seems to be a colossal idiot, getting important details wrong, leaving out failed predictions (of which I'm sure Martin has had many in the past, and there seem to be some clear stinkers in this writeup as well), and ridiculously assuming that his business credentials ("oooh, he was a travelling IBM salesman" ...big deal) somehow make him some sort of Cassandra. They do not. These credentials say nothing about Martin's ability to predict the future, but they do indicate that this author is a gullible fool.
I really liked the previous editions of O'Reilly's Java in a Nutshell and Java Examples in a Nutshell. My job doesn't involve Java (thank the gods! :), so I haven't had much use for them, but still they sit on my bookshelf, and my co-workers that do program in Java have either borrowed both of them repeatedly or have copies of their own. (The same author, David Flanagan, is also the author of a couple of O'Reilly's JavaScript books, but that's not what you're looking for here.)
(Ok sorry I can't resist -- my favorite lame Java bashing line: "Java has all the graceful simplicity of a systems language like C with the incredible performance of a scripting language like Python. That is to say, it's ugly as hell & slow as shit." Personally, I say if you're better off going with ugly but fast, like C, or pretty but slow, like Python. Java is the worst of all worlds, remarkable mainly for the dexterity with which Sun's marketing department has shoved this terrible language down our collective throats.)
But, like I say, I'm trying to be constructive here :). Less sarcastically, the Nutshell books are great, both as a learning tool and as a refernce later, after you're comfortable with the language. The same applies with other books in the series too.
:)
thanks. glad to see the glaring typo didn't hinder your enjoyment ("c'mon, just two dozen characters & still you screw one of 'em up! sheesh!").
<musing>
It occurs to me that banner ads on a search engine are probably doomed to failure anyway: if a visitor comes in specifically looking for topic $foo, they're not gonna care about advertisement $bar. People using the web have notoriously short attention spans -- or I do, anyway :). Most of the time, they aren't likely to allow themselves to be distracted by an ad (or the link beyond it) unless it happens to be *really* close to what they're looking for in the first place. And even then, if I'm searching for e.g. "mistadobalina" and I happen to be shown an ad for Del Tha Funkee Homosapien's home page, I'm going to be skeptical about clicking on it out of fear that that site just wants me to buy something, even if that would otherwise be the exact site I'm looking for.
</musing>
The book & movie were written simultaneous, as a collaborative effort. Both Kubrick & Clarke deserve equal credit. It is perfectly legitimate to attribute many of the elements in 2001 to Kubrick, when considering that a lot of the same themes showed up through all of his movies, and not just becase Clarke put them in this one.
Unless IIS version 5 is GPL all of a sudden, it looks like this story has been cut off. Are they trying to cover their tracks here?
Thanks, I made it up myself.... hehe...
Err, yeah, exactly. Kinda like going to a movie & the projectionist is trying to make sense of this big box full of film snippets, because the studio couldn't be bothered to edit it all together. If it ain't done yet, then it doesn't deserve a good review.
Software producers get off way too easily here, and should be held accountable for products shipped before they're ready for use. I'll make an exception for free software (which is never really done yet), but if you want to bundle it up & make money off it, then you have to be able to stand behind what you've done. Or half-done, in cases such as this one.
So this company released a half-assed product. The Slashdot staff was apparently unable to even get the product running, and yet you want details about how it ran? It sounds to me like it didn't run at all, and I'm glad they said so. That's *very* helpful.
As another respondent suggested, I'd love to see a version of Consumer Reports for software. Too much half-assed (&/or bloated) garbage gets released to the public (like, oh, any version of Office from the last five years), and things like UCITA make it difficult or impossible to find this out for ourselves until our money is spent and our computers are corrupted.
I'm not a fan of computer games, but I liked Myst & Riven, and was thinking about getting a copy of Myst III. That's not gonna happen now, because of this very helpful review. You didn't like it, you wanted something more like fellatio, fine. Michael told you where you can find it. Myself, I was very glad to read this review. It was helpful to me.
Waitaminute, why is the logo for the Patents topic a picture of silverware? How is that relevant? Just occurred to me how little sense that makes....
Sounds like I'd pretty much have to overhaul the system. I'd be willing to upgrade the ram, but aside from that, forget it. Oh well. Thanks for the information. (Oh, and I think the closest Fry's is about 3000 miles from here, unless they've set up shop on theEast Coast & I didn't hear about it... :)
I liked Dune better than C&C for the same reason that I liked X-Wing & Tie Fighter better than other piloting games: it was fun & it reminded me of a movie and I could get into the characters without having to wade through someone else's hokey back story. (Rather, it was a hokey back story that I was already familiar with :). Someone asked why games companies bother making product like this instead of flagships like C&C, well, I'm yer answer -- some people could give a rat's ass about their flagships. :)
So. Does anyone know [a] how much this one's gonna cost, and [b] what specs it requires? I can throw it on my NT laptop from work, but I'm not about to "upgrade" to 2k or ME just for a video game. If it was fairly cheap & would work on a PIII/128mb ram/NT4sp6 computer (which dual boots into BeOS, not that I expect that to be useful...), I might consider it. Just curious -- their web site doesn't say a damn thing about the requirements or cost and I don't really feel like looking around for a copy at the malls if it's not gonna work anyway...
Yeah, well that's the headline, but if you read more than the first paragraph you realize that that's not at all what they're saying. They're trying to get at methane (natural gas) that happens to be locked in ice, but that (duh!) isn't itelf ice.
It may be methane in a frozen state, but that is hardly the conventional meaning of the term "ice". This is a bit like saying $oil_company is trying to meet energy needs with dirt, because they're digging an oil rig that happenes to bore though dirt.
The fact is, these methane deposits seems to exist along a lot of the world's continental shelves, but we haven't yet found a way to bring them to the surface. So these people happen to be going after one of these deposits that happens to be sitting in some arctic ice. Nifty, but not news, and certainly not news in the way this was written up.
Nothin' says editorial integrity like a Slashdot writeup....
NASA is in a sorry state right now. The space station is a lousy way to get out of the stagnation that we've been locked in ever since the shuttle program got underway. More competition from a Russian/Australian alliance (as well as from China et al) could be a very good thing, both for NASA and for global space exploration in general.
I'm for anything that would get us off our asses and have us out doing something interesting, like exploring Mars, rather than putting Yet Another Damn Tin-can in orbit. Someone at NASA has a huge David Bowie fixation, methinks....
Among other things, this page has an earlier and much shorter version of the UBS warburg disclaimer. Apparently it has been growing -- run away! run away!
;)
"And my penis, which I am very self-conscious about, has been measured at 2.15 inches."
Sorry, I know this is flamebait, but damn I can't help but think there's a very large grain of truth behind the idea that a man's penis size is inversely proportional to the horsepower-to-mass ratio (or just raw horsepower, depending on the version of the formula you find funniest) of the vehicle he drives.
In a blatant attempt to violate this law, my dream car is an Austin (or Morris, et al -- whatever) MINI. These are the coolest cars in the world. Someday I will have one. Oh yes. Someday... :)
Seriously, if you have a population of $num people, and each person is consuming $quan amount of energy, then the total consumption is of course going to be $num * $quan. If each individual can reduce their consumption, even marginally, then the net result -- $num * ($quan - $conserv) -- can be pretty significant on the aggregate. Certainly cheaper than producing lots more power plants.
I'm willing to accept that we may need more plants, but it would be a lot less expensive for everybosdy if, say, everyone stopped driving those stupid Suburban Ussault Vehicles. The reality is that any solution is going to be a big, expensive project for the country to undertake, and anything that helps control the size & burden of that project would be much welcomed.
Just propagatin' the memes. Flamebait? That's hardly fair, but oh well. :)
'nuff said.
Not even, say, "mcgospelfest"?
How utterly, utterly bizarre. What are they up to? No good, I'll wager...
Which would ya rather be -- condescended to, or insulted? Now you have a choice!
I'm so sick to death of seeing big, boring, bloated Powerpoint slideshows that are, aside from being generally completely devoid of content, also a terrible waste of resources.
A Flash movie with the same content can be much more dynamic, much smaller, and will work on damn near any platform without modification -- most everyone with a web browser seems to have the plugin for it by now. I'm not a fan of Flash by any means, but for this sort of task, I can't imagine why anyone would use Powerpoint instead. Powerpoint is, quite simply, pointless software.
As for the dual headed thing, other posters have addressed this. It's pretty easy with most modern hardware...
End of official "Reply." Now, here are some Kubrick word-play names to add to your list:
Put them all together and you get "Helen and Wooden Horse Reflect Troy's Downfall."
Dave Bowman:
Dave is short for David, who slew the giant Goliath by planting a rock in his forehead. Dave Bowman slays a giant (Hal-Discovery) by attacking the brain inside Discovery's forehead.
Bowman literally means bowman and refers to Odysseus, who was a renowned bowman.
Frank Poole: [F]rank Poole is a "90 percent anagram" in which the last nine letters can be rearranged to form the phrase "[W]alk on rope." This phrase alludes to Frank's role as the symbol for Nietzsche's rope dancer, or tightrope walker.
HAL 9000:
HAL is the letters IBM retreated one notch back down the alphabet. On the man-machine symbiosis allegory the HAL-IBM connection symbolizes the synthesis of man (Hal, a man's name) and machine (IBM, a machine's name). In the Zarathustra allegory, HAL-IBM refers to Nietzsche's idea that man created God in his own image. IBM symbolizes the idea that Hal-Discovery (God) was created by man, as all machines are, and HAL (a man's name) symbolizes the idea that God is the image of man. Arthur Clarke denies that the name Hal involves symbolism, but on pages 72-75 of my book I give six reasons for believing Clarke is wrong.
9000 refers to the first 9000 years of history in the mythological history of the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism--the 9000 years that precede the arrival of Zarathustra, who arrives in 9001, the first year of the tenth millennium. Hal and Dave Bowman arrive at the same time, so the "9000" in Hal's name describe's Dave's (Zarathustra's) arrival time too. In the film's title, 2001 symbolizes 9001: the first year of one millennium symbolizes the first year of another.
Elena: Elena, the name of the female Russian scientist Heywood Floyd meets on the space station, is Russian for Helen. Elena symbolizes Helen--Helen of Troy. Her presence inside the slotted female space station identifies her with the female partner in the copulation between the phallic earth shuttle (male) and the space station. Floyd, who symbolizes Paris (Helen's seducer) at this point, was inside the shuttle, identifying it with Paris.
TMA-1 = TMA-ONE: This name is an anagram whose letters can be rearranged to form "No Meat." TMA-1 is the name of the moon monolith, which symbolizes the meatless (wooden) Trojan Horse.
AE-35: I didn't include this one in the book, because I wasn't certain enough of my interpretation. But AE seems to stand for AEolus, king of the winds, whose winds cause trouble for Odysseus. And the 35? A hurricane is the epitome of wind. And the Hawker Hurricane, the famous British fighter plane from World War II, is associated with the number 35 in three ways: (1) The plane was first test flown in '35 (1935). (2) The original plane had a ceiling of 35,000 feet, although later models got up to 36,000. (3) The prototype Hurrican was labeled F.36/34, the two numbers of which average out to 35. Meanwhile, the AE-35 unit causes trouble for Bowman (it leads indirectly to Poole's death), just as Aeolus's winds causes trouble for Odysseus.
I hope you find this information useful, or at least interesting.
Sincerely
Len Wheat